9781422271018

Contrary to popular belief, about three percent of inmates escape from prison at some point during their incarceration.

flooded, the second a furnace collapsed into, the third flooded, and during the digging of the fourth, the prisoners had to work in shifts, because the air in the sewer they were moving through had grown so foul that they could not breathe. A miner would work until he could not hold his breath or until his candle burned out. Two prisoners missed roll call, alerting the guards to something amiss. When one of the same prisoners later missed roll call a second time, the other prisoners forced him to stay in Rat Hell until the escape day, so the guards wouldn’t think he’d already gone. After 17 days of digging, they finished, or so they thought. When they crawled through the tunnel and broke through the ground outside, they needed seven more feet to reach the safety of a shed. Ducking down and pulling dirt over the hole, they continued digging to make the tunnel seven feet longer. It had taken two weeks of work to make the first, failed attempt on January 26, 1864, in the original tunnel that flooded. The aborted

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